Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffett's Wisdom
Brain research at Caltech and Virginia Tech suggests an early warning signal tips off smart traders
Investment magnate Warren Buffett has famously suggested that investors should try to "be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearful."
That turns out to be excellent advice, according to the results of a new study by researchers at Caltech and Virginia Tech that looked at the brain activity and behavior of people trading in experimental markets where price bubbles formed. In such markets, where price far outpaces actual value, it appears that wise traders receive an early warning signal from their brains—a warning that makes them feel uncomfortable and urges them to sell, sell, sell.
"Seeing what's going on in people's brains when they are trading suggests that Buffet was right on target," says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.
That is because in their experimental markets, Camerer and his colleagues found two distinct types of activity in the brains of participants—one that made a small fraction of participants nervous and prompted them to sell their experimental shares even as prices were on the rise, and another that was much more common and made traders behave in a greedy way, buying aggressively during the bubble and even after the peak. The lucky few who received the early warning signal got out of the market early, ultimately causing the bubble to burst, and earned the most money. The others displayed what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance" and lost their proverbial shirts.
A paper about the experiment and the team's findings appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Alec Smith, the lead author on the paper, is a visiting associate at Caltech. Additional coauthors are from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
The researchers set up a simple experimental market in which they were able to control the fundamental, or actual, value of a traded risky asset. In each of 16 sessions, about 20 participants were told how an on-screen trading market worked and were given 100 units of experimental currency and six shares of the risky asset. Then, over the course of 50 trading periods, the traders indicated by pressing keyboard buttons whether they wanted to buy, sell, or hold shares at various prices.
Given the way the experiment was set up, the fundamental price of the risky asset was 14 currency units. Yet in many sessions, the traded price rose well above that—sometimes three to five times as high—creating bubble markets that eventually crashed.
During the experiment, two or three additional subjects per session also participated in the market while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. In fMRI, blood flow is monitored and used as a proxy for brain activation. If a brain region shows a relatively high level of blood oxygenation during a task, that region is thought to be particularly active.
At the end of the experiment, the researchers first sought to understand the behavioral data—the choices the participants made and the resulting market activity—before analyzing the fMRI scans.
"The first thing we saw was that even in an environment where you don't have squawking heads and all kinds of other information being fed to people, you can get bubbles just through pricing dynamics that occur naturally," says Camerer. This finding is at odds with what some economists have held—that bubbles are rare or are caused by misinformation or hype....MORE
